We are excited to release the capability to annotate PDF files, a feature that has been among the most requested for a long time. The reason that it has taken us so long to release this feature is that PDF is a proprietary standard and very challenging to work with, especially within browsers. But with enough dedication to the problem by our team, we are happy to finally take it out of beta.

Another problem that we have been struggling for a long time is spam – spammers have been very aggressive and crafty on our site, harassing users and importing junky content. Spammers are costing us lots of resources not only in hardware, but also in manpower as we spent time developing anti-spam techniques and manually policing the site. We have decided to take a different approach to this problem by limiting the social privileges of free users. We now require captcha on many social features, such as following people, joining groups, etc. For a very nominal fee, you can upgrade yourself to “Social Membership,” which would grant you full social features without capcha, plus a lot of other goodies. We expect to stop the vast majority of the spammers with this simple measure.

We’d like to elaborate more about Social Membership and its pricing and our thoughts behind the decisions. As long-time Diigo users know, Diigo is a personal knowledge management tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community on the other hand. While it is perfectly fine to use Diigo solely as the former, we do believe that the value of the knowledge-sharing community could be substantial, as the number of active users increases, and as the spam is minimized. As a result, we have decided to set the social membership annual fee at $5/year on Oct 1, 2014, and will increase the price gradually thereafter according to a pre-determined formula, as the number of active social members increases. To reward existing users, an attractive promotion price of $2/year will be available until Oct. 1, 2014. For future years, you will continue to pay the low annual price you paid in the first year, as long as your credit card stay valid for automatic renewal.

We have also taken this opportunity to re-adjust our pricing plan to better align users needs with our business model. Existing basic and premium users will be automatically upgraded to Standard in the new pricing plan.

We believe that it is paramount for both the Diigo team and Diigo users that Diigo has a viable financial model so it can continue to have the resources necessary to get better and better, and be around for 100 years or so🙂 In the last few months, several products that sort of compete with Diigo, such as Springpad, Kippt, etc, have either announced shut-down or were put on hold. Diigo is in a better shape than these companies, thanks to your support, and we hope you will continue to show your support and help Diigo improve and flourish!

With these exciting developments, we feel ready to declare the arrival of Diigo 6.0. Although version number does not mean a whole lot with internet products like Diigo that are being continuously improved, we are still happy to use it as a reminder of the long journey we have been through and the exciting improvements to come.

Our team always sees our users as a partner in getting the product right, and we appreciate and look forward to your feedback and continued involvement.

This feature allows you to email your links and notes directly into your Diigo library. This is especially handy when you are on a mobile app. Emailed links or notes will be saved as private by default.

Diigo Welcomes its 7th Million User with a Major Redesign~ heightening its focus on being a “multi-tool” for knowledge management

Diigo was started as a simple social bookmarking service in 2005, and is now widely regarded as the most widely used and most robust web annotation tool in the world. By steadily enhancing its offerings beyond bookmarking/annotation to include web archiving, image/screenshot markup, group collaboration, improved information organization and presentation, and mobile apps, Diigo has effectively become an integrated “multi-tool” for personal knowledge management (PKM).

Diigo, as a multi-tool for PKM, now touches on the entire workflow for knowledge-oriented information consumption, from browsing, reading, researching, annotating, storing, organizing, remembering, collaborating, sharing, to connecting dots into knowledge – a workflow that we believe is still largely ad-hoc and inefficient. Diigo is here to streamline this workflow and dramatically improve your productivity.

The current redesign includes the following:

a complete site redesign which includes numerous usability and aesthetic improvements

a redesign of the company logo and brand image to emphasize our focus on personal knowledge management.

a major update to Diigo Browser on iOS, which provides the best web reading and annotating experience on iPad and iPhone (coming soon)

As Diigo has steadily became more versatile and powerful, it has also steadily grown its user base, amassing 7 million registered users, with more than 350 million items saved and 100 million pieces of annotations. Our users include law firms, marketing agencies, consultants, recruiters, web designers, researchers, students, teachers … — basically anyone who do a lot of knowledge-oriented information consumption, either individually or as a team, either professionally, or for personal purposes such as reading and researching related to travel, health, shopping, career, hobbies, news, online learning, smart investing, school papers, work projects, etc, etc.

Going forward, the Diigo team aims to evolve Diigo into the best personal knowledge management system (PKM) on the market, providing unsurpassed capabilities for the collection, compilation, organization, digestion, presentation and collaboration of knowledge and information.

If you use Google Reader, you must have heard that it will close down soon. As avid Google Reader users ourselves, we feel your pain and have prepared a small pain reliever for you: you can easily import your starred items in Google Reader to Diigo.

The closing of Google Reader again reminds us that it is important to make sure the services you rely on have a sustainable business model. At Diigo, it is your paid subscription that sustain our developers to keep Diigo fast and reliable, and make it better and better. If you have not upgraded, show your support for less than $2 per month and get a lot of goodies now!

As Diigo users know, Diigo has always strived to provide the best capability on the market for your bookmarking and annotation needs. One of the things that differentiate Diigo from other bookmarking services is that Diigo not only lets you save a link, Diigo enables you to save the page itself! This provides several significant benefits:

Have a peace of mind that whatever you were interested in will always be there.

You can have more powerful search capability since our internal search engine can index the page text itself, in addition to meta data like titles, tags, and annotations.

You can cache multiple versions of the same page at different times to track the changes for purposes of competitive intelligence or whatever.

We are now releasing several improvements to the caching feature:

The ability to view and add annotations on cached pages, so the same annotations will show up on both the cached pages and the original page.

The ability to easily visit cached pages from your Diigo Chrome extension (other extensions and Diigolet to follow.) So when you browse to a webpage you bookmarked before, you will see a link to “Cached Versions” on the extension. This can be a lifesaver if the page is not available for whatever reason.